Maybe a week or two ago eBay rolled out the new Detailed Defect Report. It’s not an easy thing to find so you might have missed it. Equally it wasn’t announced with much fanfare.
The report gives you more in depth information about those all important defects that determine your trading status on eBay.
If you haven’t been and checked yours out then Jane Bell (the eBay Anorak) comes to the rescue with this handy video to help you locate the report.
Whilst, of course, any additional reporting or seller resources are very much welcome it seems that this new defect report isn’t as convenient and user friendly as it perhaps could be.
One eBay successful volume seller we know has been in touch with some of his criticisms of the new report:
“I’m working my way through our defect report to see if I can find where there are unfair defects that we can appeal. We have 185 to work through from the past 3 months. Each takes about 20 minutes to investigate because it’s so hard to link back to the original transaction and correspondence. There’s not a space to put comments so you are told to build a spreadsheet and email it to customer service.
The defects in the report don’t match up to the report on the page. It’s still weeks behind. Latest transaction date with a defect is over 2 weeks ago. And because it’s so late it’s usually too late to contact the buyer and remedy the problem.
The rules are unclear, but international postage is a big thing for us: we send a tracked package next day to Italy and it arrives a day or so after the very short window that eBay tell the buyer it will arrive in. Defect removal requires proof of attempted delivery in that time. Their delivery times are fantasy and are deceiving the buyers. We can’t change them.”
Have you taken the time to digest the latest defect report eBay has made available? What have your experiences been?
18 Responses
The problem is who has time to do this and why should we have to do this.
If nothing else why can’t ebay just email a quick suggestion email once a month, such as perhaps you need to update this listing etc?
When you sell on 20+ marketplaces with various accounts and websites we just don’t have the time for this.
Handy to know but seriously who has the time for this nonsense, we’ve got money to make.
A tub of cleaning tablets is apparently not as described, it wasn’t a tub? we sent you a packet of biscuits? A collection only item which is cancelled because buyer can’t read ‘collection only’ is a defect, oh yeah, sorry.
Bore off eBay.
As Whirly says “who has time for this nonsense”
I had 8 –
4 apparently because I was out of stock, although the cancellation was submitted because the buyer changed their mind or there was an issue with the buyer address”! So ebay just changed it?
2 were INR for items where the buyer wasn’t at home but delivery was actually attempted on time, and sorted with customer.
1 was for a customer who didn’t read the description, complaining it did not include x, when it clearly stated it did not include x.
Just 1 was correct, for an item that Royal Mail deliverd to Argos late – assuming of course that it wasn’t Ebay’s partner Argos who was slow handling it.
The only benefit of this is that if you “download full report” from the link below the nonsense table, it gives you a very neat column of the user IDs which you can then VERY QUICKLY stick on your blocked buyers list!
well as far as defect reports go; this is a vast improvement over the previous.
first thing i had to do with the old report was add three columns and insert my own formulae to make it semi-useful; now it has usernames in, items hyperlinked already, dates which cases were opened.
i’m still being punished for people trying to defraud me, but its a step in the rigth direction i suppose.
we need the 5000 limit on blocked ids raised lol
Buyers and getting to know how to open up a return case defectively for a full refund.
This is out of order and ruins businesses.
The new report is better. As we were recently just 5 defects away from top rated I have spent a lot of time manually cross referencing transaction ID’s with buyers. It was to no avail unfortunately as ebay only removed 2 defects. We have (now had) 1 buyer who has purchased same item 3 times in past 6 months and each time leaves feedback like “A++ Seller, Fast Dispatch…” but then gives 1 star for delivery time. Something is fishy but ebay is steadfast that the buyer “has the right to their opinion”, and I agree, especially when the buyer publically states “Fast Dispatch” – but it all falls on deaf ears. I’m told to improve my photos.
The net result is, the new report is certainly better; because it makes it easier to discover who to block.
Oh thats handy!
Ive a customer that has ordered a couple of times from me. His address is the back of beyond in Scotland and the times he has ordered from us he opened cases because delivery was delayed reaching him with our couriers by 1 day each time.
Its a pity people like this are so gung ho because we used to swallow the remote service charges ourselves for such destinations. As a result we simply added a rather hefty fee for remote areas like this and it seems to have deterred them so far.
This used to work but has now become inoperative for approx the past 3 weeks, all I get is “Sorry, this information can’t be displayed at the moment due to a technical issue. Please try again later”